Credit: www.jenningswire.com
(Concluded from Part 1.)
I’d like to turn to realization now and suggest an analogy for it.
Having an agreed-upon analogy allows us a common standard we can point to. The analogy I’d like to make is between what happens when we have a realization and what happens when we finish a jigsaw puzzle.
Over the Christmas holidays, my family put together a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. It was so much fun that I downloaded the 36-piece variety onto my iPhone and continued to play.
One thing I noticed shed light on realization. I saw that, whether or not I was shown the puzzle picture before the pieces flew apart, within less than a second afterwards, I’d forgotten what the picture looked like. Even what it contained, whether it was sea or sky, city or nature.
I even discovered at times that I was making the puzzle upside down and it didn’t register on me until the puzzle was complete.
Until the puzzle was complete, I had no idea what the picture was. I was at worst ignorant and at best confused.
Often, when I saw the picture, I’d say “Wow, it’s a mountain lion.” “Holy cow, it’s an eagle.” I was surprised. This “Aha!” moment that I experienced each time the puzzle completed itself is exactly the type of realization I’m describing. It’s realized knowledge but of a strictly-limited impact. Realization in the microcosm of life not the macrocosm. Ground-level rather than lofty realization.
Intellectual knowledge is informative but not very elevating. Experiential knowledge is definitely more absorbing, inviting and stimulating. But still feelings only go so far. They don’t necessarily move us.
Realized knowledge, from the standpoint of impact, has more impact on us than either of the other two. It’s like an electric shock that moves the will. It spurs us to action and is unforgettable when it happens. I sometimes think that the story of our lives could be rendered as the story of our realizations.
Realization is realization. What seems to differ is degree or intensity. Bliss is the same. Bliss is bliss. But we have lesser and deeper experiences of it. Our ground-level realizations of today can only grow in depth and intensity in this ripe setting of gradual and oncoming Ascension.
I had a powerful experience of a puzzle becoming a picture in 1987. (1) It demonstrated realization at a much deeper level.
I asked the universe that day, as I drove my car down Oak Street in Vancouver, if it was possible that life was a puzzle and, if it was, what was the picture that life is?
In response, the universe turned out the lights, turned on the cosmic projector, and showed me an eight-second wordless movie of the journey of an individual soul, through lifetimes in matter, from God to God. The puzzle of life had become a picture. A moving picture at that.
In the eight seconds of that movie, my car did not move an inch: I had been outside of time.
The impact of that puzzle becoming a picture rippled down through my life for the next twenty years. It introduced new ideas, or re-ordered old ones, or recontextualized them, like the Divine Plan, evolution, enlightenment, humanness, etc.
The realization I had at that time was that enlightenment was the purpose of life. That’s the conclusion I reached from watching the cosmic movie. The puzzle of life became a picture and the picture was one of expanding enlightenment, culminating in total awakening.
The lesser moments of ground-level realization or awareness feature a seeing that’s surprising and bring an instantaneous reordering of the context in a timeless moment, a moment of breakthrough, a moment of recontextualization, reconciliation, and reconstruction – a moment of completion.
Completion is like the soil and realization is like the seed growing in the soil. Completion is rich soil for realization. As it is for transformative love and probably many other things.
Being complete doesn’t depend on how finished our “To Do” list is. It depends on our (realized) say-so. We are complete when we say so … and truly mean it. It is, after all, our life.
Footnotes
(1) “The Purpose of Life is Enlightenment – Ch. 13 – Epilogue,” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2011/08/13/the-purpose-of-life-is-enlightenment-ch-13-epilogue/.